Observations 1.16

Later today President Obama will announce his plans on gun control. Always ready to do its part yesterday the NRA contributed to civil debate by releasing this ad which features the President's daughters. Yes they have armed guards, they happen to be called the Secret Service, probably because from the moment their father became president they became targets for well armed nutjobs from all over the world.

Now just imagine this, everybody sitting around NRA headquarters trying to come up with a new ad. One person thinks of something, another writes it up, and than they throw it upstairs where somebody with the authority gives the idea a thumbs up. They pick photos and music and put the ad together. Finally they all sit around a big table where they watch the finished ad together before smiling and nodding approval. Yes lets bring the President's daughters into it, lets make it personal. I'm sorry this is picking on Amy Carter or Chelsea Clinton, this goes over a line. The ad is currently running on just the NRA's news channel but they haven't ruled out purchasing time on other networks.

Maybe I should just let the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns Mark Glaze say it in a more rational way than I am, "I’m guessing Sasha and Malia would be delighted not to have security, but their dad happens to be president."

And while I'm at it why is it suddenly elitist for the President of the United States to have Secret Service protection? I don't remember ever hearing that about any other president. Think about that one too.

The whole thing just disgusts me.

link
Published on Jan 15, 2013 by NRANews.

update - Here is a link to a .pdf file listing the twenty three 'gun violence reduction executive actions' taken by President Obama today. Also here is a link to the President's complete plan including actions that need Congressional action.

If I'm going to be disgusted today I think I'm going to go for totally disgusted. When the President announced his gun control plan he was accompanied by children who had written him after the Newtown slaughter. Rush Limbaugh gives a better description,

"Now, if a bunch of kids wrote the president and said that their parents aren't giving them enough candy, do you think Obama would have them to the White House and do candy-control ceremonies? Obama uses kids as human shields. The Democrats use kids as human shields. He brings these kids who supposedly wrote letters to the White House after Newtown, brings them up there to present a picture of support among the children for the president to do something about guns. It's gonna be very difficult, very difficult to oppose it. You got these little kids there. They don't want to die."

Among other nutjob responses to the President's plan were calls for his impeachment, for insurrection against the tyrant, that President Obama should be charged with treason, and that we should all prepare for civil war. There was a time I used the term nutjob to add a bit of sarcasm to what I was writing but more and more I think some of these people are seriously flawed.

The gods help us.

Observations from the Coffee Shop 1.15

This may be bad form, or maybe it's just perfect, but I'm going to update you a little on guns on Martin Luther King's birthday. Originally I was going to post this as my Sunday observations, I had some good links to go with it, but other things came up and now the guardians of the empire seem to have lost my links.

In typical Amerikan lunacy NRA memberships and gun sales have surged since the Newtown massacre, magazine and rifle orders have a backlog of almost a year, but this time around there's a new wrinkle. There now seems to be a national ammunition shortage so bad police departments across the country are cutting back on training. In some cities the shortage has gotten so bad the police have resorted to buying ammo at local gun shops. This means there is a good chance the NRA's vaunted good guys with guns wont be able to hit the bad guys with guns should they see them. You can bet the gun industry is enjoying their rising profits once again courtesy of the NRA and the nutjobs that worship it.

A seriously funny side story to this is that some gun and ammo buyers are complaining about price gouging. Seriously. On one website a buyer whined about paying $999 for a case (1,000 rounds) of ammo listed at $399 in the site's catalog. I'm not going to get into the reasons somebody might need 1,000 rounds of .233 (bushmaster caliber) ammo but somebody left a good quote as a comment to his tirade. "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt," Abraham Lincoln.

For the record, as of today there have now been 936 gun related deaths in the U.S. since Newtown.

Observations 1.14

If you didn't see the Golden Globe awards last night Jodie Foster's acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award is worth watching. Actually you may have to watch it more than once to get it all because it's a bit rambling. Sometimes you start saying things you have had on your mind for years and when you start you just can't stop. Sometimes it's also a beautiful thing.

link

Observations 1.13

You may or may not have heard of Aaron Swartz. At the age of 14 he was an early developer of the RSS web feed technology and later he worked on the creation of Creative Commons, was one of the founders of Reddit, and in 2010 launched Demand Progress. If you want to know more about Swartz you can check Google News which now comes up with over 100,000 results. A good start is "Postscript: Aaron Swartz" from The New Yorker.

A brilliant coder, hacker, and activist he was studying at Harvard when he was charged with stealing 5 million articles from JSTOR, a searchable archive of academic journals, which he planned on publishing online. While illegal it was far from enough to warrant over a dozen felony counts or the threatened 30 years in prison and million dollar fine the federal lawyers were promising, somebody wrote that he was being persecuted not prosecuted. Friday Swartz, who also suffered from depression, hung himself in his New York apartment at the age of 26.

But this post isn't totally about Swartz's life, or hacking, or depression. Once again stories I care about seem to revolve around one another.

Quinn Norton is a journalist for among others Wired and The Guardian who I first started reading when she covered the occupy movement from one coast to the other, her "A Eulogy For Occupy" is a must read. If you read enough sooner or later you run into a writer who more often than not thinks the same way as you do. That doesn't mean you always agree with them but you do understand what they are trying to say at some deeper level and as I followed Occupy Quinn Norton was just that type of writer to me.

I didn't know until this morning that Norton and Swartz had at one time lived together in San Francisco. She wrote a touching farewell to him on her blog which she ended with W. H. Auden's "Funeral Blues."

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

update - I just saw that as a tribute to Swartz many researchers have begun to post their papers free using the twitter hashtag #pdftribute and somebody created a link scraper to collect PDFs and links with that tag. You can check it out here if you want.

I also saw that JSTOR had dropped the case saying it regretted being drawn into it in the first place. However the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen M. Ortiz, decided to go ahead with the high profile case anyway and the trial was scheduled to begin sometime this year. One has to seriously wonder about the whole affair given the, from my experience, limited value of academic articles. Why go after him like an accused terrorist or Wall Street banker? Well okay, why go after him like an accused terrorist?

1/14 update - From the official statement of Swartz's family:
"Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community's most cherished principles."

Observations from the Window 1.12

In 1972 Jeanne Manford's openly gay son Morty was beaten as he and others where beaten as they handed out fliers outside an annual dinner for politicians and reporters in New York. Two months later she marched with him in the Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day march carrying her hand made sign that said simply "Parents of Gays: Unite in Support for Our Children." The Christopher Street march became the annual Gay Pride parade and Jeanne Manford became the founder of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, a group now 40 years old with 350 chapters in 11 countries (including the People's Republic of China) and over 200,000 members.

Ten years ago she explained in an interview a letter she had written to The New York Post after her son's beating, "I mentioned in my letter that my son was gay and that the police stood by and watched these young gays being beaten up and did nothing about it, and it was printed. Then Morty called me up and said, ‘You can’t believe how everybody’s talking about your letter!’ I didn't think anything of it, but I guess it was the first time a mother ever sat down and very publicly said, ‘Yes, I have a homosexual son.’"

In a 2009 speech to the Human Rights Campaign President Obama praised Manford. Her work was the "story of America, of ordinary citizens organizing, agitating and advocating for change, of hope stronger than hate, of love more powerful than any insult or injury." Than he told a story of the Stonewall Riots during which her son Morty, who died of AIDS in 1992, was arrested. After coming to her door and explaining the arrest one of the officers added "and you know, your son is a homosexual." Manford's answer was "Yes I know, why are you bothering him?"

"She was just a mom, walking with her son in a parade," said Terry DeCrescenzo, a gay and lesbian teen advocate in Los Angeles. "That was what made her so compelling. She was simply standing with her son, bearing witness to the truth of his life."

Jeanne Manford passed away Tuesday, she was 92.

The family requests that any donations be made to the Jeanne Manford Legacy Fund to support the ongoing work of PFLAG National: 1828 L Street, NW, Suite 660, Washington, D.C. 20036.

Observations 1.10

I've mentioned the petitions on the White House website plenty of times, some funny, some scary in their total ignorance, and some very serious. Here is the official response to the petition to deport Piers Morgan over his views on gun control. The video is President Obama's personal response to all the gun related petitions and at the bottom is a link to a video from "Piers Morgan Tonight" a few days ago in which wingnut radio host Alex Jones goes into full meltdown mode.

OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE RESPONSE TO
Deport British Citizen Piers Morgan for Attacking 2nd Amendment
When Discussing the Second Amendment, Keep the First in Mind Too
By Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary

Thank you for participating in We the People to speak out on an issue that matters to you.

Let’s not let arguments over the Constitution’s Second Amendment violate the spirit of its First. President Obama believes that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms. However, the Constitution not only guarantees an individual right to bear arms, but also enshrines the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press -- fundamental principles that are essential to our democracy. Americans may disagree on matters of public policy and express those disagreements vigorously, but no one should be punished by the government simply because he or she expressed a view on the Second Amendment -- or any other matter of public concern.

We recognize that the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, sparked an intense, and at times emotional, national conversation about the steps we can take as a country to reduce gun violence. In fact, your petition is one of many on the issue, and President Obama personally responded by sharing his views on this important issue.

link
Published on Dec 21, 2012 by WhiteHouse

"How many chimpanzees can dance on the head of a pin?" Otherwise known as 'my name is Alex Jones and I have totally lost it.' You really need to watch this, CNN.

Observations from the Window 1.9

You may or may not have noticed but I am never satisfied. It shows when I'm seriously paint because as I have said before I can lock myself away for days until I look at what I'm painting and decide it's finished. I am constantly tweaking the code of this blog in ways you will never see and probably wouldn't see if I told you what I did. I play with embed codes down to the pixel so they are centered, something that can be frustrating because I realize it is all going to look different on a comp with resolution settings that aren't the same as mine. More than once I have changed the whole design only to change it back before ever posting it.

Lately I've been seriously toying with the idea of changing over to a complete dynamic view template. Serious to the point of learning some of the code. One thing holding me back is that there are some things I can't do with a dynamic view that I can with this one. Another problem is everything in this blog is fitted to this template, some of which I wrote myself, so if I change over videos, photos, and other embeds could be totally out of whack, out of whack being a highly technical term for totally messed up. One option is posting dual blogs for a period of time and than gradually phasing out this one. That also has a downside because even with links between the two a new blog is just that, a new blog, with all the problems of a new blog.

My geek side is pretty much just mulling this over in print but you can take it as a warning if you want to. If one day everything looks weird, if it looks like my geek side has suddenly and totally lost it, I have no problem with you letting me know.

I've never had much use for Pinterest, I have enough photo sites with Flickr and Tumblr, but I like the idea of saving what I find online to look at later without making a mess of my browser. I just ran into a newer site called Clipboard that I like. With a browser attachment you can save not just photos but entire web pages or just parts of them to Clipboard. It's CEO and founder Gary Flake says Pinterest is about expressing an aspiration but Clipboard is about getting things done, one of the reasons that the site's default setting is private. As there website says "the Internet is more than two decades old, doesn't it seem strange that the typical way to save something online is to put it into an email or a document?" If you're an online pack rat like me it's a site you might want to check it out.

Did you know the TSA has a job described as a Behavior Detection Specialist? Maybe the Mayans were right after all.

Observations on Art 1.7

A friend of mine sent this a while back and I finally got around to watching it. The video itself is cool but you need to read the words as you watch or read them and than watch the video again. It reminds me of an art versus science post I always promised to do for her but is still languishing on the dark side of my mind. Easy for something to get lost back there. A funny thing about the exert is that it could easily be the two of us he is talking about.

"I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe…

I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts."


Richard Feynman - Ode To A Flower from Fraser Davidson on Vimeo.

An animated adaptation of an interview excerpt from Christopher Sykes’s 1981 BBC documentary about Richard Feynman, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out."
Animated by Fraser Davidson, sweetcrude.tv

Sunday Observations 1.6

So I woke up to a perfect storm of hockey this morning. After a 113 day lockout and a 16 hour negotiating secession came this from The New York Times, "Breaking News: NHL and Players Union Reach Tentative Agreement to End Lockout." As I was reading the headline it was snowing slightly in the Village, a documentary on the Philadelphia Flyers was on HBO, and today just happens to be Flyers owner Ed Snyder's 80^th birthday. No details on when the season will start or how long it will last but this is critical information as my brother owes me a trip to a Flyers game which was last year's birthday present and I have every intention of collecting it.

I really don't watch a lot of TV other than sports and the usual Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, Alex Wagner MSNBC lineup but suddenly I find myself swamped with things I want to see. I had been watching Revolution from the start but I never got back to it after a storm named Sandy took out our cable. I always thought Falling Skies looked good so when it showed up free on Amazon Prime I started watching that and burned through season one in a week. Now Bo is coming back in season three of Lost Girl and I haven't seen any of season two yet. But Lost Girl just appeared free on Netflix so I'm torn between watching the second seasons of Falling Skies and Lost Girl. Netflix also has all the seasons of Nikita for free so if I can't make up my mind I can always watch that. Than again soon I can just watch hockey.

While I'm on entertainment, I mentioned before I was reading Salman Rushdie's "Joseph Anton" which is actually a memoir of Rushdie's after he wrote "The Satanic Verses." If you like memoirs or history it really is very good but it's a hard book to start. Joseph Anton is the name Rushdie came up with at the request of his guards from the Special Branch of the British Metropolitan Police. What you have is Rushdie writing a biography of Anton who is actually Rushdie and sometimes reads like Anton writing a memoir of Rushdie who is at the same time Anton. Once you get past all that it's an easy read and sometimes reads more like a spy novel than anything else. Just take my word for it.

Happy Birthday Mr. Snyder, somewhere Reggie Dunlop is smiling.

You can look that one up.

update - I'm not sure if this is an update to this post or yesterday's on Penn State and the way stories twist around each other. No NHL schedule has been announced yet but it will either be a 48 or a 50 game season. If it is a 48 game season the Flyers will open with an early afternoon game against the hated Penguins on January 19^th in Philadelphia. Early afternoon because that night the new Terry Pagula financed Penn State ice hockey team plays Vermont at the Wells Fargo Center.

Observations on Art 1.5

These videos always fascinate me, I'd love to do something like it but I know I would never have the patience to finish the year. Years ago Court and I toyed with the idea of my sending her little snippets of video and her editing it into a longer film but neither one of us ever pulled the trigger. Maybe one day.


Just A Second 2012 from Kent Frost on Vimeo

Posted January 4, 2012.
Filmed with the following cameras:
Canon EOS 550D (Rebel T2i)
GoPro HD Hero 2
Samsung Galaxy S2 Skyrocket
Edited using Sony Vegas 10.0 Pro
Music: "Souls" by djSaint (Harold Alexis Remix)

Observations from the Window 1.5

This is the first of two small updates on the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State. I won't get into the scandal itself again, personally I hope he rots in prison, just click on one of the tags if you somehow don't know it. I just find these stories interesting as hell because of how things change over time and how some stories always seem wind and twist their way into others. This post falls into the latter category.

All the background you need for this part is to remember what the scandal did to Joe Paterno and the Penn State football program. Paterno's firing, the NCAA $60 million fine, banned from bowl games, and the loss of scholarships. With the end of the Paterno reign a savior was summoned from Boston, Bill O'Brien. Amid all the turmoil and scandal O'Brien and the team had an awesome season that any other year would have landed them in a New Year's Day bowl game or better.

The problem is O'Brien did such a good job with the mess he was handed that his stock as a coach will probably never be higher. Multiple NFL teams, including the Eagles, wanted to talk to him and rumor has it the Penn State administration was so sure he was going to leave that they started a list of coaching candidates to talk to about replacing him. Enter a second savior in Penn State graduate Terry Pagula who had already donated over $100 million to start Penn State's division 1 ice hockey program. Out of nowhere the story went in a completely different direction Thursday night.

From a Buffalo News report; "Pegula donated a $1.3 million gift to be added to O’Brien’s salary in the coming year that will bump his total compensation to $3.6 million and place him behind only Ohio State’s Urban Meyer and Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz as the third-highest-paid coach in the Big Ten." Bill O'Brien announced he would not be leaving Penn State, had never really planned on leaving, and was indeed happy in Happy Valley. You can think what you will about O'brien's comments but they are probably casting his statue as I post this.

Still, I do have a small problem with Terry Pagula.

How could I possibly have a problem with a fellow Penn State alum, a man who gave birth to the Penn State ice hockey program, built a state of the art ice arena, and kept O'Brien in Happy Valley? Pagula also happens to be the owner of the Buffalo Sabres of the National Hockey League.

I'm not even going to get into that.

Observations from the Window 1.3.1

The first new post of year four is going to be something a little different for me. I'm going to respond to a few suggestions, comments, and reminders from the past few days.

A friend of mine reminded me that if this is the start of the fourth year of this blog it's also the start of my fourth year in the Village. I hadn't even thought of that but it's very true. It's also a little hard to admit but I think I feel more at home here now than I do in the mountains and that is something I didn't think I would ever say. I still think of my dad's as home though, that is until I plant myself in that apartment in Paris.

Lately I've been told that sometimes I'm a bit too harsh in my comments, something that I think was intended as much for me personally as for my writing. To be honest for the most part I've always been that way but as I got older I also realized that anything else was totally a waste of your time and mine. I don't see my ever changing that opinion.

Someone recently mentioned that I don't write about personal things very often. My answer to that was that if there was a story to be had it was in here somewhere. There isn't much of a personal nature I haven't written about that I intend to write about, it's all in here somewhere but it might take some digging to find it. Something you are not going to find in here are bad personal relationship stories because, as Ash says, you aren't ready for them, can't handle them, just don't want to know. Also I don't plan on ever writing about my relationship with Anne Hathaway.

Finally earlier today I had a suggestion from somebody who has been reading this since I started. He left a very kind comment but than suggested I "skip the effing sports section." I would seriously consider this but I'm not quite sure what if anything Swedes know about sports so I'll just have to shrug it off as a well meaning but totally off suggestion.

Sarcasm, than again maybe it isn't.

Observations from the Window 1.3

From the archive. The first post in this blog, tune included, from three years ago today. I didn't say quite as much when I started so I could probably write more introducing it than I wrote at the time but I'll try hard not to which means I better stop now ....

Here I Am
Why am I doing this? Honestly I have no clue.

In the past weeks I left a place and a job I love dearly. Penn State University (btw Capital One Bowl final. PSU 19 - LSU 17). A good friend of mine moved to the west coast. And the day after new years I moved in with another good friend in the Village. Soon Ill be starting a job in a gallery there.

Years ago I kept a journal. It always seemed to help me clear my head in the 'dark days'. Recently I had a conversation with a doctor friend who thought it might be a good idea to do it again. To help me adjust to all the recent changes in my life.

Well here I am. Time will tell .....

tuneage

Happy 2013

I just wanted to take a minute and wish everyone a Happy New Year. In many ways it was one of the more interesting New Years Eves I can remember, both personally and in the news. I hope you all had an entertaining one too.

No sports or politics today because both the NHL and the Republican Party have me totally irritated. I'm not going to get into the hockey because they are meeting now and there still might be some news today. I will say I think any freshmen intro to government class could do a better job of running the country than the wingnuts are. But anyway I said no politics today.

I made a fleeting attempt at writing this at breakfast this morning when somebody reminded me that this is the start of the fourth year of my little project. When I started writing this blog I didn't know if it would last three weeks let alone three years. It has changed dramatically over the years and at times I go off on wild tangents but I do still enjoy it. I have no idea where it will go this year other than to say I really do want to write more about art, it just seems like something else is always happening that needs my undivided attention and I just have to write about it. Sarcasm.

I hope you enjoy it somewhat, learn a little something, and sometimes even think about what the hell I ramble on about.

Thanks for reading and, again, have a Happy New Year.